4 - Power, fairness, and the global economy

Summary

The process of economic globalization has come under widespread attack in recent years. These attacks are not simply economic or material in nature, coming from workers or industrialists whose jobs and incomes are directly threatened by the consequences of greater openness. Beyond these interest-based grievances, a host of activists, policymakers, and scholars have come to see the policies of openness, and the associated outcomes, as being fundamentally “unfair” or “unjust” to many peoples, especially the poor, and to many countries, particularly those in the developing world. These critics question the very morality and legitimacy of existing global economic arrangements. There is no shortage of pronouncements to that effect.

Thus, a Washington-based policy analyst has called the trade policies of the United States and European Union an “ethical scandal” (Gresser, 2002: 14), while the US trade representative has branded European protection of its agriculture “immoral” (Becker, 2003). The Belgian foreign minister has proclaimed the need for an “ethical globalization” (Verhofstadt, 2002), and the former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, has even launched an “Ethical Globalization Initiative.” The president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, laments that “something is wrong” with the global economy, while his former chief economist, Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, has glibly remarked, “Of course, no one expected that the world market would be fair …” (2002a: 24).

What all these remarks suggest is that power and material self-interest have trumped fairness and justice in the design of international economic institutions and policies.